he nodded. His knuckles were pale and swollen. Scholem assumed it was due to poor circulation or his heart.
‘You look well,’ he said at last.
‘Liar,’ responded Benjamin disconsolately. ‘That’s what you say when it’s not true anymore.You know what Lisa Fittko calls me? She’s Hans’s sister – the man we just met on the stairs. She called me old Benjamin. A lot of people do. They just don’t know that I know.’
When they went out later for a stroll, Benjamin clung to Scholem’s arm. Scholem was significantly taller and younger too.
‘Are you trying to kill me, Gerhard?’ he said, using Scholem’s childhood name. ‘Go slower. Remember that I’m old Benjamin.’
It wasn’t an easy encounter after so many years. Intense years that hadn’t chipped away at their friendship so much as assailed the ideas they once had in common. If they disagreed now, sparks flew. They fought on rue Dombasle, in the cafés along Boul’Mich’, and they fought on the street. They argued about Walter’s friendship with Brecht, about his essay on the work of art in the mechanical age, about Céline and anti-Semitism, about the trials in Moscow that the world was watching with bated breath. Benjamin was reticent. His responses were torturous, he treated Scholem as if he were a party member, a ‘class enemy’, despite the fact that Scholem had never officially joined up and often disparaged the communist leaders. He may or may not have known then the fate of Asja Lacis, the revolutionary Latvian that Benjamin had met on Capri in 1924, the woman that he perhaps loved best of all, and who in the end fell victim to the great Soviet purification.
Benjamin continually side-stepped things, avoiding, even dodging the subject of his arrangement with Horkheimer and Adorno’s Institute, which Scholem was not enamoured of. His friend attempted to engage him, but Benjamin brusquely and stubbornly shut him out.
‘I’m very happy with them,’ he’d say with conviction. Then, not half an hour later, he would admit that he could neither stand nor respect Horkheimer. ‘I don’t know. He’s not trustworthy, even on the theoretical level. Not a small thing . . .’
On their last evening together, the two sat on a bench in the Luxembourg Gardens, resting. It was already getting dark, and it was cold. The sky was gritty and an angry wind announced that winter was on its way. Straining for breath, Benjamin stared at the branches of a nearby lime tree that looked unhealthy.
‘Under the roof of the institution,’ he announced as if talking to himself, not looking at his friend, ‘the tattered thread of my life is lost.’
‘Kafka?’ asked Scholem, sinking his chin into his collar.
‘Exactly,’ smiled Walter. ‘Two years,’ he added with a sudden seriousness. ‘I would really need two years of not having to depend on the Institute. To be able to concentrate on Passagen-Werk. It’s not even a viable option here in Europe, but if you were able to rustle up some kind of appointment for me, something, then I could liberate myself from Horkheimer. I swear I would. Could you ask your editor friend, Schocken, if he would let me write a book about Kafka? Then I could at last come to Palestine.’
The light in the sky slackened and seemed on the verge of disappearing. Lower on the horizon, just over the tree line, darkness was gathering. Scholem looked angrily at his friend, as if the shadow of a cloud had crossed over him. His expression read vexation and pain as if some old decay had suddenly emerged.
‘You remember Magnes?’ he suddenly asked.
‘Magnes who? Your chancellor in Jerusalem? Him?’
‘Yes, him,’ replied Scholem.
They weren’t looking at each other as they spoke but staring at the gravel by their feet and at the hedges along the street. But Scholem could imagine his friend’s face gone red with anger and embarrassment.
‘You remember,’ he added to fill the silence, ‘don’t you, that ten years ago I asked him to lend you money so that you could study Hebrew and come to Palestine? You changed your mind, but you never returned the money. Now you want me to ask again on your behalf?’
The last sentence seemed to come from Scholem’s feet, as if he were trying to subsume his anger.
‘I can explain that. I can explain everything,’ muttered Benjamin, watching a dog go into a flowerbed at the end of the path.
‘Of course you can explain. But how do you explain it to me, Walter?’
Benjamin looked up and tried to smile now.
‘Do it for a friend,’ he said. ‘It’s the last favour I’ll ask.’
Scholem didn’t blink for a long, a very long minute.
‘Okay, I will try,’ he answered.
Walter looked at him hopefully. He was struggling to keep down another thought that he knew should surface – he had to hide it. Just a little while before this he’d scolded Adorno when he left for New York. ‘You have to stay,’ he told him. ‘You have to stay here. If we all leave, Europe will cease to exist.’
But now he’d reneged even on himself. He sat with his gaze cast down, and pushed the pebbles around with his toe. The park was slowly emptying. Beyond the gate, the street lights of rue de Fleurus had already come on.
‘It’s late. I have to go,’ said Scholem with a sigh.
That was the last time they saw each other.
Chapter Ten
You know, we didn’t have a chance of winning and we should have admitted it back then. Think about it. While Franco was attacking Aragona, Hitler swallowed Austria whole – in a single night. While everyone – France, England – they all just shut up, sat back and watched. This whole line we got handed of non-intervention. If it weren’t also a tragedy it would be a farce. It wouldn’t have even taken much; a child could have seen it. Hell if Mussolini and Hitler weren’t going to intervene. After Austria, people started admitting it, but didn’t concede it. As if no one could see what the Germans were up to. Everyone was too busy fawning over them. Adolf pointed and everyone else saluted. Even Stalin. And believe you me, the idea that he was our ally should have been looking dubious by then. France opened its border for a while, just enough time for us to get some arms in, but then they closed right up again. Europe was abandoning us. And then what did they go on to do?
Don’t look at me like that. I know this is the sort of stuff you say afterwards. The situation was not perfectly clear back then and in any case it wasn’t like we could just open the battle up to those sons of bitches. We didn’t have any choice back then.We had to fight anyway, and all we could do was pray for god knows what – a miracle. Or that no one had the last word yet.
After the retreat, Mariano and I walked around Barcelona as dejected as could be. During the day we hung around headquarters waiting for the platoons to be reorganised and for someone to tell us what to do.At night, lucky us, we’d be with Ana María and Mercedes. But something had changed, though I didn’t know what.You could see it in the way we smiled, the way we talked. It was just like before but wrapped in a sadness that wouldn’t go away if you scraped it. Mercedes and I kept up like before but something was prickly between the other two. Then they had a fight one evening when we were heading to the movies near Paralelo. Mercedes and I were walking ahead. Ana María must have said that she didn’t love him anymore
